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Lottie likes to sit on the porch during twilight hours, when the sky above her is this hazy mix of gray and indigo and the air feels cool and dark, but not heavy. Not like the syrupy humidity that was always hanging heavy over the cabin when the Yellowjackets first woke up, but light, gossamer, like butterfly kisses, like the thin white fabric of that nightgown Laura Lee let her borrow during the baptism. There's a little wind blowing so sweet against her, and a chorus of insects serenading her. All the others are either inside or off doing tasks (or in the case of a few duos, each other) and though Lottie can hear their muffled voices if she strains herself, it's so easy to forget they're there and slip into the wilderness around her until she was breathing in time with it.
(Sometimes, and she doesn't admit this, doesn't want to admit it because damn it, it scares her to the bone that she's thinking this way, she wants to stay. Thinks that she prefers it out here, thinks that she'd be so happy if she could never go back. Yeah it's a fight for survival but at least its honest and it feels like herself and not whatever façade her parents were dressing her up in to keep that whole rich social status thing they've got going on. At least out here she doesn't feel everything about her is wrong. And she'll never say it aloud because it seems like whenever she speaks its like she's dragging something terrible up from within her and the things she talks about all seem to become real, as if her tongue shaping the words is tied up with a god shaping the world. But Lottie knows deep down inside of her that there's this crazy dream of hers where she lives out here, wild and uninhibited, just her and the forest and this cabin which she made her home, made her temple.)
There's the creaking of the floorboards and the groaning of the door and were it anyone else coming out, Lottie would sigh at being interrupted, but its Laura Lee, Lottie knows that before she even sees her. She can tell by just the pattern of the footsteps. (She's gotten good at that, these days, seeing without really seeing. Knowing, intimately, what's going on around her. And if there's some special attention paid to picking out all the details about Laura Lee, well then, so be it.)
"Hi," Laura Lee says, looking down at Lottie with that soft smile. Her hair had been tied back in a ponytail but a few strands were slipping loose, framing her face like a halo in the last light dying on the horizon. "I hope I'm not interrupting you."
"Not at all," Lottie replies. Like Laura Lee could ever be an interruption. Like there would ever be a moment when it didn't make Lottie's heart skip a beat to see Laura Lee. "Wanna sit with me?"
"Sure," Laura Lee says. She takes a seat beside Lottie on the porch steps. Their hips and elbows and shoulders bump, and Lottie can feel Laura Lee's warmth even through the fabric of their clothes. And then Laura Lee rests her head on Lottie's shoulder like it was just meant to go there and Lottie just wants to freeze time, to stay in this moment forever, with their bodies locked together like puzzle pieces. She feels dizzy with it all, and she knows Laura Lee feels the same way. She doesn't understand why, sometimes, why Laura Lee wants her, when she's so good and Lottie's so fucked up, but she spends every day grateful that this is her reality. A lot of the time, these days, every word she speaks feels like broken glass scraping against the back of her throat, but when she talks to Laura Lee, when she expresses her love for Laura Lee, it's effortless.
